The Apocalypse Script (8 page)

“
The newcomer
introduced himself as
the
Sillum
- ‘the Unseen.’ The Sillum said he
had come to Tiwanaku because his god had directed him to build a
gateway through which its minions could come into the world and
take possession of it. The alignment of the stars dictated that the
portal be built in Tiwanaku. The Sillum said that he would require
the king’s population to be enslaved for that purpose because the
design parameters were unforgiving, the schedule pressing, and
movement of megalithic stones a necessity.”

“
I’m guessing the king wasn’t
receptive to the request.”

“
Your guess is correct. King Pumuk
was outraged. How dare a stranger come to his kingdom demanding
that his people be enslaved to build a portal for a foreign god!
The king directed his guards to arrest the Sillum but as they moved
to obey, the stranger spoke a word and the guards turned against
their own king and slew him, instead.”

“
What did the stranger
say?”

“
One word.”

“
What was it?”

Lilian shrugged. “The legend
doesn’t tell us. But it says that he then spoke another word and
everyone within earshot of the Sillum fell under the stranger’s
spell. In due course the man had the entire population constructing
giant stone buildings, walls, and the gateway itself, upon which
the Sillum attached tablets with cryptic writings. He said the
tablets contained the history of his god and foreign lands and the
workings of the universe and that it was written in the language of
the heavens.”

“
Wait a second…what did this
portal look like?”

“
I think you can guess,
Ben.”

“
The Gate of the Sun?”

“
Bingo!”

“
Ha!
Perfect.
When does the movie come out?”

“
Not for a few hundred years,”
Lilian said mirthlessly, accelerating. Checking the speedometer Ben
saw they were traveling at ninety-five miles per hour.

He said, “These are the tablets in Ridley’s
possession?”

“
That’s right.”

“
Given that civilization continued
unimpeded, I’m guessing the portal didn’t work as
advertised.”

Lilian moved her head left and
right. “Not exactly. When it and the other buildings were finished,
the Sillum conducted a ceremony and begged his god to send armies
into this world to claim it in his name. The legend is that the god
answered the call and sent its vassals through the portal in the
tens of thousands. Hideous beasts that sent the population
fleeing.”

“
And yet?”

“
Yet almost
immediately after emerging from the portal, they began
to
die.
”
The woman’s tone became humorously sinister. “All of them, with
horrific cries of alien pain and anger. Their corpses began to
putrefy, to stretch and bloat and burst into thousands of pieces.
Every inch of the ceremonial site was blanketed by a foot of purple
and pink slime that smelled worse than…” She stumbled, at a loss
for words.

“
Rotten eggs?” suggested the
passenger.

Lilian scrunched up her nose. “I
was hoping to do better than that.”

“
Still, pretty cool,” said Ben,
because it was. “What happened next?”

The storyteller blew through one
red light and then a second. A cacophony of car horns chased after
them. Seeming not to notice, she said, “With a howl of frustration
the stranger allegedly passed through the portal to the land of his
god. His priests - locals who had adopted his god of their own free
will – fled into the jungle. Most were tracked down and
killed.”

“
Which brings me back to my
original question. How did Ridley end up with the
tablets?”

“
Ah. As luck would have it, a
member of our society, a Nisirtu, was being escorted through the
region by a local resident the evening the ceremony was conducted.
He claimed to have witnessed the entire episode and made a record
of it.”

Ben laughed. “Okay, you’re telling
me that the he actually saw monsters?”

“
Of course not.
I am telling you that is what the he
reported
seeing, probably after
chewing on a few too many cocoa leaves.”

“
Any idea what turned the monsters
into purple goo?”

“
According to
our legendary explorer, ‘twas
time
that killed the
beasts.”

“
Huh?”

“
He said he interviewed one of the
Sillum’s captured followers, who implied that the ceremony had
failed because the beings came from some place very near ‘the
Nothingness,’ a place where time is almost, but not quite, at a
standstill. Thus they were unable to acclimate to this reality,
which is ‘rich’ in time. Their physical bodies couldn’t handle
it.”

Ben pushed out his lower lip.
“‘Time depressurization?’”

“
Or
pressurization, if you like. But according to the disciple, the
Sillum had other followers who would pursue their master’s cause
and someday they would find a way to bring him back to try again;
that there were things that could be done
when the stars were right.
It was only a matter of time, the prisoner said, before the
ceremony succeeded. He was beheaded shortly thereafter.

“
Said Nisirtu had the Sillum’s
tablets removed from the failed gateway and shipped to one of our
society’s buildings in what is now Argentina. There they sat
neglected for a very long time, until my father came across them.
When my father died he left them to Ridley, who was his closest
friend.”

Lilian cut across three lanes of
traffic to reach an exit ramp. More horns blared behind them. “And
that, sir, concludes the legend of the tablets.”

Ben grunted his approval. “If the
tablets end up being authentic, I’ll include the backstory as part
of my research paper. The media will love it.”

“
Ridley can add to the narrative.
I’m sure I missed some juicy parts.” She reached out with one hand
and ran her fingers playfully through his hair. “Perhaps we should
take a break for a little while, though? You look like you’re about
to pass out.”

Ben sighed, disappointed that she
had noticed. The painkillers and the lack of sleep really were
beginning to make him lightheaded.

He said, “What kind of perfume are you wearing?”

“
Private label.”

“
It’s nice.”

“
Thank you.”

His eyelids began to droop. “Maybe
I’ll just shut my eyes for a few minutes.”

Lilian nodded. “That would be
best.”

As his seat was whirring to a reclined position, he
said, “Lilian?”

“
Yes, Ben?”

“
Try not to kill us on the way to
Steepleguard.”

The driver tapped the brakes,
skidded fifty feet, and downshifted to navigate a hairpin turn. She
said, “You worry too much.”

The funnel cloud descended from
the black sky and sucked him out of the car, throwing him into a
gray fog. Ben felt himself falling. Surveying the brown terrain
below he realized that the vortex had carried him back to
Afghanistan.

As soon as he was on the ground he
heard the terrible high-pitched screech of a base alarm, followed
by a man’s voice screaming
“
Incoming! Incoming!
Incoming!
”
Yet
the former Marine found that he was standing in middle of the
desert, far from any base or bunker.

It was night and the silhouettes
of the steep, jagged mountains of eastern Afghanistan surrounded
him like the coiled, spiked tail of a dragon. He saw lights
hurdling down from the starry sky to the Earth below, and he
thought, ‘rockets!’ and knew only the Taliban used rockets like
this and they only fired them at Coalition bases, so he ran toward
the falling stars.

There seemed to be millions of
them, which was ludicrous, because the insurgents never had more
than a few dozen on hand and rarely fired them all at once. They
were psychological weapons that rarely caused casualties and thus
were used sparingly. Each time one of the lights overhead descended
behind the mountains there was an ear-piercing ‘CRACK’, like a
shotgun blast at close range, and he cringed.

He found he was running through a
field of dead horses and then he was on one of them and racing
toward the mountains and the battle. He could hear explosions and
screams and the too-familiar whooshing noises as glowing objects
zipped over him to the mountains ahead.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
CRACK!

Somehow his reanimated horse made
it to the top of one of a mountain in just a few leaps, but when he
got there the battle was over. The skies were still and all was
silent. It was cold and the air smelled of burnt wire. Below him
was a narrow valley dotted with hundreds of giant glowing oysters,
and he wondered why there were oysters in Afghanistan.

They began to pop open, one by
one.

His horse collapsed and he fell
and rolled into the valley, stopping a few feet from one of the
shells. It was covered in colorful squiggles that glowed like neon
lights. It was still closed but he could see movement through the
crack between top and bottom. Someone was inside.

No, not someone -
some
thing
. It was
too big and too wrinkled and hideous to be human. He saw a tentacle
or snake or worm slipping through the cracks and moving toward him.
He was paralyzed and could feel his chest emptying of breath. The
mountains began to rotate - to
slither
- around him, growing closer
with each revolution, and he realized they were not mountains but
something else entirely.

“
Run!
”
said
the blasphemy inside the shell as its cold, slimy tentacle wrapped
itself around his neck
.
“
Run, or
die!
”

“
Ben, wake up, we’re almost
there.”

It was Lilian’s voice coming from somewhere far
away.

“
Ben?”

He felt his body moving left and
right and with a start he jerked forward, his eyes
opening.

“
What?” he said. He turned to see
Lilian looking at him.

“
Steepleguard is just around the
corner,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for almost three
hours.”

“
Oh,” he said, self-consciously
wiping a drop of spittle from his chin.

She looked at him with concern.
“Are you okay?”

“
I’m fine.”

He watched as Lilian turned right
off the main road and ascended a secondary paved road that was
surprisingly wide and well maintained. Ten minutes after that they
took another turn and drove past a large stone monument bearing a
bronze plate that read “Steepleguard Hotel.” The tires hummed and
bounced as the surface beneath the car changed from asphalt to
cobblestone.

The hotel finally came into view
and the immensity of the structure took Ben’s breath away. Built in
the Swiss Chalet style, the brown brick edifice was really several
structures, some four stories tall, others five, and still others
six, that seamlessly abutted one another. Countless dormers and
towers of stone and masonry jutted out from the walls. It was as if
all the buildings of a medieval Swiss village had been somehow
squeezed together. The roofs, for there were many, were steeply
pitched and composed of layers of etched turquoise metal that he
assumed was copper. Snow capped mountains surrounded and towered
over the building, yet also seemed to pay homage to it.

“
Wow.”

“
Yes,” agreed Lilian.

“
How many rooms does this thing
have?”

“
Four hundred or so guest rooms.
There are also a few guesthouses in the woods. If you think this is
impressive, wait until you see the Great Hall.”

“
What does Ridley do with all this
space? You could house a displaced nation here.”

“
Most of Steepleguard is sealed
off. He works out of a few rooms on the bottom floor.”

“
Does it have
electricity?”

“
Yes. There are no distribution
lines to the hotel because of its remoteness, but there is an
impressive array of generators and sophisticated geothermal and
solar apparatuses that Ridley installed a few years
ago.”

“
I’m surprised he thinks it worth
the effort. It’s an amazing place but it must cost a fortune to
maintain it.”

“
Money’s not an issue for
Ridley.”

Ben chuckled sardonically. “Of
course it isn’t.”

They came to a stop at the end of
wide cobblestone walk that led to two immense black oak doors that
served as the hotel’s main entrance. The doors were easily two
stories tall and elegantly carved with reliefs of mountains, lakes,
wildlife, and, curiously, a five-circuit Cretan labyrinth. The
harp-shaped handles were made from deer antlers.